Saturday, April 19, 2014

Never Let Me Go

This is my second song to tab from the Million Dollar Hotel soundtrack. (The first was "Satellite of Love," a Lou Reed song, of course, but with a different arrangement.) Since tabbing "Satellite," I finally watched the movie. Its opening five minutes are stunning: a crack-of-dawn helicopter shot of downtown LA (accompanied by "The First Time"—U2 at their most Velvety), culminating in the happiest suicide imaginable, a dive off the eponymous hotel with one hell of a view on the way down. Sadly, nothing else in the film comes close to being that good. I'm sorry to report that The Million Dollar Hotel is a barely coherent, unfunny mess. It stars Jeremy Davies, one of the most mannered actors in the world, at his mannered worst. Moreover, that soundtrack, which I'd absorbed over the past decade and half, does not set the mood as I'd thought it would. Much of the music in the film is unfamiliar, and some pieces from the album never seem to show up. In other words, the movie, for me, was kind of a bust.

Ah well. The music remains great, including this sultry ballad, which gives us an idea of what Bono-the-solo-artist might sound like. Joined by that crack MDH Band of Jon Hassell, Bill Frisell, et al, it evokes for me mid-70s Bowie songs like "Win" and "Wild Is the Wind." (Bowie is at the root of a lot of U2's music.) As with the MDH version of "Satellite," I appear to be the only human on the Web who has bothered to tab this thing. (Almost forgot—you'll want to listen to the song, of course.)